Last year, Newtown's housing market started to rouse from a long slumber, and the Planning and Zoning Commission approved two major multifamily housing complexes. One, on a 42-acre site off Hawleyville Road, will add 180 rental apartments to Newtown's housing stock. The second, on a 12-acre site in Sandy Hook on Washington Avenue, will add another 65 units. Both developments were approved under the town's Incentive Housing regulations, which provide developers some flexibility in designing their projects in exchange for a commitment to include a percentage of units priced lower to meet the housing needs of residents of modest means.

Newtown still falls well short of the state's goal for municipalities of 10 percent affordable units in their local housing stock. The way the state Department of Housing (DOH) currently calculates affordable housing, just 1.85 percent of the town's residential units qualify as "affordable" in its latest 2013 report.

Just over a year ago in this space, we encouraged the legislature's Housing Committee to adopt changes in the state's current affordable housing law that would recognize and encourage local efforts to diversify the housing inventory in affluent municipalities where people who are decidedly not affluent have few residential options. That effort went nowhere.

Yet the elected representatives from around the state, including Newtown's State Senator Tony Hwang and State Representative Mitch Bolinsky, are trying once again. The Housing Committee conducted yet another hearing in Hartford on Tuesday this week, and once again local officials testified that many towns, like Newtown, are not getting enough credit in the state's calculations for existing lower-priced housing. For example, the 134 units of affordable housing for senior citizens at Nunnawauk Meadows each count as just half a unit in the state's formula. The town's three trailer parks are totally excluded from the DOH accounting as are the many single-family homes that are available for $200,000 or less.

We cannot minimize the problem. The national Center for Housing Policy issued its Housing Landscape 2016 report last month, which found that one in five of Connecticut's 548,432 households shoulder a "severe housing cost burden." And the state's goal to have all of Connecticut's 169 towns and cities join the effort to address the issue is reasonable and fair. But in assessing the challenge and the measures taken to meet it, no one is served by inflating the problem artificially. Ignoring real-world housing options for people needing decent and secure affordable housing, and overruling local regulations as a result, including incentive housing regulations, undermines environmental and quality-of-life goals pursued locally for the benefit all people, not just the well-heeled and well-housed. It is a policy that imposes severe density and environmental burdens on those who have enough problems just finding a home.

We ask that the legislature not miss another opportunity to engage communities in solving these persistent housing problems. We should not cling to a system that fosters local resistance through court orders and indifference to actual housing markets and discourages local engagement and cooperation in meeting housing goals as part of larger quality-of-life objectives for all citizens. It only postpones the day when so many struggling families can move into the decent homes they want and deserve.